One goal for globalization of support operations is reducing the cost of key functions. Service support is an exemplary function and it requires qualified staff and appropriate technologies. While existing approaches are used to connect customers to service representatives across the globe, the problem with incorporating qualified staff remains largely unresolved. Currently, technology support is tightly coupled with the language of a support requestor and the language of support providers.
Existing approaches include, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,136,825 entitled “Work assignment system and method, distributed client/server system, and computer program storage,” which includes work assignment system for assigning and composing a work formed from a plurality of work standards to a plurality of stations.
Also, existing approaches include, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,884,247 entitled “Method and apparatus for automated language translation,” which includes representing natural-language sentences in accordance with a constrained grammar and vocabulary structured to permit direct substitution of linguistic units in one language for corresponding linguistic units in another language.
Another existing approach includes, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,928,448 entitled “System and method to match linguistic structures using thesaurus information,” which includes a system and method for evaluating similarity among multiple data structures.
Existing approaches also include, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,139,752 entitled “System, method and computer program product for performing unstructured information management and automatic text analysis, and providing multiple document views derived from different document tokenizations,” which includes a system architecture, components and a searching technique for an Unstructured Information Management System (UIMS).
Another existing approach includes, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,948,022 entitled “Remote collaboration system,” which includes using multiple computers to hold a conference.
In countries with one or more populations that speak non-standard languages, or when dealing with individuals in more than one country, the support question should first go through people with appropriate language skills. These people may be unavailable at the time of the request, thus creating an issue for global support providers that fundamentally complicates and restricts support globalization and increases the cost of the technical support while potentially decreasing its quality.